People like me: who prefer not to kill animals to live but enjoy the taste of some type of meat in moderation. I am absolutely happy to pay for a premium meat alternative for the occasional visit to a burger joint. There are lots of them where I live alongside the Beyond patties and they're quite popular. I'm not quite sure what desperation has to do with it - you just eat things you enjoy that fit your dietary preferences.

Most 19 year olds probably wouldn't opt into injecting themselves twice a day for weeks and dealing with the side effects of the injections, then the subsequent extraction procedures (likely for multiple rounds) even if it was paid for. Which is reasonable, considering most women who want children will have them without IVF and don't need to go through any of that.

yeah, what the fuck? This comment section is utterly fucking insane.

It's not only hard and painful, but potentially damaging to the woman's body and could leave them with permanent hormonal issues.

So, no. It's not a good policy.

Then it's not a very good population policy.

It still might end up as yet another thing we do to women's bodies.

To be clear: I agree that it's not great policy to pressure women into doing this (which, arguably, making egg-freezing free would tend to do), bodily autonomy concerns chief among them. It's also not great policy to withhold this as an option from poor women while allowing rich ones access to it (the status quo). The third option would be to ban it, but that has obvious problems too most notably that womens' reproductive health is already surveilled and politicized enough without adding another new crime to police for around it. Allowing it in certain circumstances (a "medical waiver" or similar) just reproduces that same issues as banning it, and would probably be just a waystation on the way to a full ban.

I've yet to see a good proposal for how to regulate or handle this as a society, so my best guess is that we keep the status quo (it's expensive so only rich people can do it) for the foreseeable future UNLESS it becomes some kind of culture war issue for MAGA, which seems honestly pretty likely. Presumably they would want to ban it, but allow exceptions for certain cases that amount to "but is the patient a married white woman with acceptable politics?" in a more legally palatable form.

I enjoy being alone (emphasis: alone, not lonely), but I don't think it's good to try to force yourself to just cope with it somehow if it isn't your thing. But then, you seem to not want to do anything that would help you not be alone? It sounds like you're trying to turn yourself into a different person, which seems even harder than things like finding a hobby or joining a Meetup group.

Anecdotally, not with depressive symptoms but anxiety, I find that use of ChatGPT/Claude for 'brainstorming' personal situations was definitely a gateway to further rumination for me. As someone who works on AI agents I thought I'd never fall into that trap and knew how to use it 'properly' when I wanted a sounding board. I was wrong. I now avoid general-use chatbots for personal issues as much as I can because it feels like it's helping in the short term, but has always been worse in aggregate.

(I say general-use because I think there are some AI-based tools that are specially made which _can_ actually be helpful for this - but opening a ChatGPT tab, even with lots of relevant instructions, ain't it in my experience. The interface itself is counter-productive to healthy processing.)

I _loved_ Language Transfer when learning Greek. I haven't used it in many years, but at the time remember that I went from just being able to say "Hi" and "How are you" and "Good" to speaking full sentences with my boyfriend at the time in one day. And when visiting Greece later that year I could get by with strangers in everyday interactions easily. It was a mind-blowing learning experience, as someone who is not highly gifted in languages, and I donated to the LT creator.

Now I am learning Swedish. It has been taking me _way_ too long and unfortunately LT doesn't have a Swedish course. Looking at one of these documentaries about Michel Thomas it does indeed look like exactly that kind of approach! And I see he has a Swedish course. I'm excited to give it a try!

I've found the opposite when using Anki myself. The process of developing the deck is a critical part of learning the material for me. I consume my target language, see something I don't understand, figure out what it means, then put it into the deck - and _then_ practice it. To cut out the whole first part of that chain by using a premade deck eradicates much of the learning process for me (I've tried).

Works well in some cases (eg some language learning patterns - but not all) but not in others. And even when you "create your own cards" you're usually using resources from elsewhere - eg native speaker audio on language cards.

A significant number of anki users (eg: medicine, law - others) are working with pre-made decks and if you look at anki's competition - all of them offer pre-made decks as a key part of it. Medics have always used flashcards (many university bookshops sell physical flashcards for medics) and I don't each medical student would benefit from producing, eg, their own anatomy flashcards.

I've been using Anki for a few years and have never experienced it as neglected. There are regular updates and a big community contributing knowledge, add-ins, etc.

Just for myself. Helps me consolidate my own thoughts and learnings. Sometimes I google something and my own blog comes up. That gives me a bit of a laugh (and is sometimes useful).

This doesn't really seem like a competitor to OP? I think it might solve different needs. One looks like a straightforward tracking app and yours looks like some kind of training/lifestyle program.